


back seat

by kidcomrade



Category: Breaking Bad
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-03
Updated: 2013-02-03
Packaged: 2017-11-28 00:58:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 326
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/668445
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kidcomrade/pseuds/kidcomrade
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Cars are loud and infants have little ears.</p>
            </blockquote>





	back seat

The thrumming of the car's engine had become commonplace for her these days.

It'd been noisy and irritating at first: a distressingly  _angry_  noise that reverberated throughout the boundaries of this strange, enclosed world. And she'd cried the first several times her mother had set her in the back seat. Holly would wrench her small watering eyes together, twist her mouth and  _scream_  until she wore herself out and only rasped and sobbed, exhausted.

But like all things, she'd eventually grown accustomed to it. It faded: oppressive, once, now a dim white noise, soothing her not in silence, but in its monotony. She had just learned to navigate her own neck; to hold up the seemingly immense weight of her tiny skull. The colors flew by outside as she stared.

Blue. ("The sky, baby.") White. ("What does  _that_  cloud look like? Oh! A bear!") Green. ("Trees--can you say 'trees'?" of course not, but she cooed back at her mother's disembodied voice, satisfied with her effort.) 

Holly found these long expanses of time soothing. Years later, she would fall asleep on long drives, without fail--like an old instinct from these long-past days of car rides with Mom, maybe, her head lolling onto her shoulder, forehead smudging the window. 

That wasn't now, though. That was too far away. Days, months, years; time was still too distant and vast a concept for her to fully comprehend now, she who still fussed when Mother was silent for too long, because that absence meant she'd surely disappeared and left her for dead.

To Holly White, these moments stretched endlessly--the hum of the car, her mother's kind voice, the rhythm of the car: motion sometimes, none at all other times, nearly always that hum, hum, hum of the engine all around her.

Occasionally there was the rustle of leaves of paper. They sounded so like the little white bird Mother had pointed out to her at the park, once.


End file.
